Because Andrew Albosta is too long, and rewAl.com was taken.

There’s lots of ways to mold a cat.

Cast items on display. Photo by Steven Strasburg.

Jay Mazur, from Reynolds Advanced Materials, stopped by Nova Labs on January 25 to lead a demonstration on various types of mold making materials, applications, and techniques. Hailing from Macungie, PA, Reynolds Advanced Materials is a distributor for Smooth-on, a supplier of many different casting supplies to hobby and industrial markets.

Classrooms A and B at Nova Labs were full for the demonstration.

Classrooms A and B were both full of people interested in learning more about what can be done with urethane, silicone, rubber, epoxy, and more. Some of the materials had pot-life (the time you can work with the material after mixing the various parts together) in the two or three minute range, while others remain workable for much longer. A cast of a large silicone dime in Smoothcast 300Q (Q for “quick” apparently!) even had a dramatic reaction going from clear to opaque in a few seconds, surprising everyone in the room. It was pulled from the mold and passed around the room hardly 30 minutes after being mixed and cast.

Pouring high in a thin stream to reduce bubbles. Product was Mold Star 16 Fast – it has a 6-minute pot life and 30-minute cure.

Jay offered tips for working with various products:

The ‘double pour and mix.’ – you start by mixing in one cup, then transfer to another cup to ensure that you can thoroughly stir all the hard-to-reach material at the bottom of the container.

For foams, mixing part B a LOT before you combine with part A will help – you can add a lot of air to part B without worrying about the pot life (one flexibile foam he demonstrated only had a pot life of 50 seconds, so pre-mixing really helps).

You should also keep some clay on hand, just in case the wall around the part you are casting begins to leak.

At the end of the multi-part demonstration, Jay mixed a product called Alja-Safe and had everyone do a life cast of their thumb. After the 8-minute cure time, the same fast-cure urethane used on the dime was used to create reproductions of each person’s casting. At least a few people said that these would be used to create literal USB thumb drives!

Prepping the Alja-Safe alginate before each student was able to mold their thumb.

Molding a thumb in Alja-Safe.

6-8 minutes later, each participant could remove his or her thumb

Thumbs ready to be filled.

Round 1 complete, mixing round 2. The pot life of the Smoothcast 300Q was no more than 70 seconds, so Jay had to pour fast.

Red tinted Smoothcast 300Q for the thumbs. Photo by Brian Jacoby

Waiting for the thumbs to cure.

Comparison of the copy to the real deal.

A thumb in SC300Q.

Here are some more photos from the class.

Jay Mazur pouring the first item

A casting made of Dustin Hoffman’s face. The first layer was SC325 with flesh color added. Foam iT!5 was used as a backfill material, and was tinted blue at the request of someone inthe class. The skin-toned first layer was too thin to be opaque.

Showing the difference between resins being degassed in a vacuum chamber vs. not.

This post was written by Andrew Albosta for the Nova Labs blog, and cross-posted here.

My wife’s Honda Civic had a small pocket/cubby with a flip down door just below the stereo. On a recent road trip we found the door to be a good platform for an iPhone 6 running Waze, but it kept slipping off of the door. While a folded up napkin did an ok job of keeping it from slipping off, I thought “I can over engineer this!” so I did.

The idea was to make a 3D printed bracket that could be double-stick-taped to the door, allowing it to close as normal, but holding the phone when opened.

All of the prototypes from the first at the top to the final at the bottom. The red ones were poorly printed copies of the final.

First, second, and third prototypes.

Screenshot of the third and final design as seen in OnShape.

We both have Spigen bumper cases for our phones, so measurements were made for that. The design was completed using OnShape (this being my 2nd real thing modeled and 3D printed using the program).

Prototype 1 was much too big and clunky to allow the door to close, and the tolerances were a little tight for the phone even though it “fit.”

Two copies of the first prototype of phone holder.

First prototype in action. The phone fit, but was a bit tight.

Prototype 2 was much smaller (and eliminated the end stops just to see if it would fit), but this still proved too big; the height of the base was too tall, as was the height of the back support.

Second prototype of the phone holder. This print was OK at best, with a first layer that didn’t stick well to the bed.

Second prototype profile view. The base didn’t stick well to the bed during printing.

Prototype 2 being tested.

Prototype 3 reduced the thickness of the walls and floor greatly, and added the end stops back in. The design was no longer symmetrical (like the first prototype) so a quick reflect was used in OnShape to make the second bracket.

I tried printing the final pieces twice in ABS on a 3D printer that recently had a hotend nozzle clog… They didn’t turn out too well even after modifying the settings.

First mediocre print of the third and final design.

Left and right sides of the final phone holders. These printed better than the red ones as I switched to another printer.

Final phone holders. These printed better than the red ones as I switched to another printer.

The left side of the final phone holder.

The third design ended up working and fitting great. The door closes and the design is less clunky in general.

Double-stick foam tape was used to attach the brackets to the door.

The phone leans back slightly since the door doesn’t open ‘flat’ – this helps keep it leaning against the dash and should be secure. I don’t think a Civic has enough acceleration to have it fall down.

Nova Labs recently bought a ShopSabre RC-4 CNC router for the wood shop. A few copies of VCarve are on computers at the makerspace, allowing members to setup their tool path.

Some of the regulars on Wednesday night decided to do a “one-night-build,” or a project we could start and finish in an evening. I started thinking of ideas that we could do on the new tool (mostly so I could learn to use it).

We landed on building some stools downloaded from the open source furniture website OpenDesk. Most designs on the site are setup for 4×8′ sheets of material but we found the Johann Stool from Johann Aussage would fit easily on our half sheets of plywood.

Adobe Illustrator was used to modify the designs for the actual thickness of the plywood we bought, and to eliminate some decoration.

Starting to work through the setup in VCarve.

After those design considerations were fixed, we used VCarve to setup the tool path. They have a a makerspace license allowing for people to use the software at home in basically a trial mode, but save the G-code from the properly licensed software at the makerspace.

3D representation of the toolpath from VCarve

A .25″ end mill was used for everything, including the holes for pins during assembly.

Part-way through cutting the first stool from the 3/4″ plywood.

Part-way through cutting the first stool from the 3/3″ plywood.

Final cleanup was done with a 1/8″ roundover router bit on the regular router table. The laser cutter was used to engrave the NovaLabs logo on the top of the seat, and a credit to the designer was etched (vector cutting at fast speed/low power) onto the bottom.

A colleague/friend of mine got her first solo apartment was lamenting that she was needed a bunch of household necessities, including a napkin holder. Since she hadn’t been in a while, I suggested suggested she could make her own at Nova Labs. Annoyed, she told me to make her one; I thought the best gift was one she’d regret asking for…

The first thoughts included some messy clipart faces (think Garbage Pail Kids stickers), but I quickly settled on some nice type and alliteration.

The design. Font is Avenir Next Ultra Light

Edge view of the napkin holder

The design for the napkin holder itself was whipped up in Illustrator using a simple tabbed box type design.

Prior to a ski trip to Colorado earlier this year, I wanted to augment my box’o’GoPro mounts with a ski pole attachment. I wasn’t wild about the high profile of the official handlebar mount, so I did some searching for something better to 3D print.

Despite watching a bunch of tutorials and giving Fusion360 a shot, I decided I wouldn’t be able to create my own part in the timeframe I had.
Fortunately, there is a large community over at Thingiverse that is good at modeling, and is happy to give away their stuff.

One part cracked a little as the GoPro finger screw was tightened, as the 3D print couldn’t handle the twisting force on the nut itself. I’d say it worked alright, but despited leaving it attached to my ski pole all weekend, I never bothered to break out the GoPro to film with it.

Backer Gifts

The Nova Labs Kickstarter campaign ended successfully back in early 2015. One of the higher backer levels was for the backers’ name on a wall in the space, but we also planned on sending them a plaque.

I didn’t expect that someone would put 4 mounting standoffs on their wall, so I thought that something more like a paperweight for the backer’s desk or bookcase would be better.

The Cube

At the fall 2015 Adobe MAX conference, a booth for Universal Laser allowed attendees to make wooden stamp blocks using Adobe’s Creative Cloud Shared Libraries to get files from workstations to the folks running the laser. As the exhibition floor was shutting down they were handing out the remaining cubes, so I grabbed a few of the blanks to play with at home. I thought the 2″ cubes could be a good format for the backer reward.

Not wanting to settle on the first material idea I had, I also ordered a clear acrylic cube to test on.

In the end the acrylic seemed way too ‘corporate gift’ looking, with the birch wood being way warmer, especially after giving the final pieces a coat of tung oil.

Setup and production

Cubes in the Laser Cut software

Test cube and production cubes waiting for engraving (note the numbers on each face so I could keep track of order and “this end up” orientation).

First pass on the production run.

The key to engraving these easily was setting up a row of seven 2″ squares that were lightly cut into a sacrificial material. The blocks were then put on these lines ensuring accurate placement of each faces’ design.

Fortunately the position of “home” doesn’t change as you adjust the Z-height (you need to do the light guide cut with the laser focused on the paper or foamcore, and then drop the bed down to accommodate the height of the block.)

Masking tape was used to reduce the discoloration of the wood due to smoke from the engrave, but I’m not sure if it was worth the time needed to remove all of the tiny counters of the text, vs sanding with a belt or disk sander.

Finished engraving.

Tape off of the wood cube, but still on the acrylic.

As it was, the wood cubes were still sanded down after removing the tape. They were eventually finished with tung oil after doing a few tests with other finishes such as varnish and shellac.

A while ago I came across this cool program for designing chairs and other furniture – Sketchchair. While you could easily scale the chairs (or other furniture) to be human sized, I tested it by making some dollhouse sized items.

My first foray into the program netted me a clunky gaming rocket chair:

Laser cut ‘gaming chair’ model made from hardboard.

My second pass was actually a model downloaded from the website, which has a good number of community submitted designs, but adjusted to the size I wanted and material thickness I had available:

Model chair laser cut out of thin acrylic.

The third model I made was a sweet 80s inspired table.

Laser cut acrylic table model3D view of the table in the SketchChair program.

The software will also run a simulation to see if the chair will be stable when someone sits on it.